Three years after the federal government first announced a proposed internet filter, the twists and turns of the various versions of the policy and conflicting statements about it have been challenging to keep track of. One certainty is that the proposal as it stands after the 2010 election has almost nothing in common with the original.

The initial rationale for the ALP’s technically vague internet filtering proposal, before the 2007 election, was to protect children from exposure to unsuitable, “adult”, content. Internet service providers (ISPs) would be required to provide the option of a filtered child-safe “clean feed” for any of their customers who wanted it.

After that election, the minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, revealed that his plan for the filter would be “opt out” rather than “opt in”. Late in 2008, Conroy announced that opting out would not be permitted, and various stories emerged of what kind of content would be blocked and what methods would be used to implement the filter. Now the optional filter for the protection of children from online exposure has disappeared, replaced by a compulsory ISP filter for everyone, to block sites placed on a secret list by bureaucrats who deem the content to be inappropriate for adults.

Secret blacklist

The current internet censorship regime was introduced in 2008. This involves a secret blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the federal regulator of broadcasting, radio spectrum and telecoms. Officials in the ACMA put sites on the blacklist based on their guess as to whether the material on the page would be refused classification by the Classification Board. The Classification Board is a ministerially appointed committee that decides what films, games and books we are permitted to watch, play or read, by either classifying them or refusing to classify them, which in effect means banning them from sale. Blacklisted web pages hosted inside Australia are ordered closed down by the ACMA on pain of large fines, while those hosted overseas will supposedly be blocked by the proposed censorship filter.

This far more draconian set of proposals sparked opposition from democratic rights and civil liberties groups such as Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), internet industry groups and technical groups, opposition which spread into broader based coalitions organising demonstrations in various cities in 2009.

During this period, Conroy developed a habit of responding to even mild criticism of his proposals with insinuations that his critics were, at least, enablers of child abuse. Conroy has frequently referred to the categories of material subject to blacklisting as including child pornography, bestiality and advocacy of terrorism, in the hope that this would persuade people that these are the only categories of material that would be subject to bans and filters.

But EFA has warned: “It would include sites that provide ‘instruction in crime’, like information on euthanasia, safe drug use, or even graffiti. It would even include computer games that are rated higher than MA-15+, which are banned for sale in Australia.”

When Wikileaks published the secret ACMA blacklist, to great fulminations from the embarrassed government, it was revealed that many blocked sites were benign from the point of view of the criteria for “refused classification”. Once the leaked blacklist was on line, it was itself added to the blacklist, so linking to it from a site hosted in Australia could earn large fines. EFA linked to a blacklisted page (an anti-abortion site with graphic images) to demonstrate that the blacklist extends into the realm of political speech, but was forced to remove the link after its hosting provider received a “final link deletion notice” from ACMA, exposing the host to fines of $11,000 per day for non-compliance. This incident illustrates the impossibility of concretely discussing the merits of censorship under conditions of censorship.

Expansion plans?

Technically, the proposed filter is likely to be very ineffectual in stopping determined people with a little know-how from accessing any overseas sites. The impossibility of supervising the millions of pages on the web means any blacklisting will be triggered by complaints, putting only a tiny minority of pages under scrutiny. Circumventing the filter will not be illegal, and none of the material blocked by the filter will be illegal to download or possess except that which was already illegal to download or possess. The filter is largely useless for the purpose it is being touted for, but the government remains absolutely determined to introduce it. So what is it really useful for?

The infrastructure for the blacklisting of content at ISP level does have other potentials that could be attractive to governments and state agencies with authoritarian ambitions. Once the technical pieces are in place, it is much easier to adapt them to other purposes, in the same way that capsicum spray, originally proposed as a “non-lethal alternative” to guns in the hands of police, has been normalised into an instrument of torture. The already loose definitions of support for terrorism or “instruction in crime” could easily be extended to serve the war needs of the Australian government and its allies. For example, Wikileaks has been under sustained attack from all quarters, including the corporate media. Hypocritical attacks, smear campaigns and blocking its finances have not been able to stop its leaks or discredit them, but making it more difficult for people to access antiwar news could limit its readership.

Apart from the proposed filter and censorship regimes, an emerging concern is the federal government’s data-retention plans. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the attorney general’s department has been in secret consultations with ISPs about a plan to impose mandatory logging of the internet activities of all users and make them available to state agencies including police. There are rumours the plan may involve storing the web browsing history of all ISP customers.

It is difficult to establish the veracity of such rumours because the consultation document, released under Freedom of Information, was almost entirely blacked out, with just a few paragraphs, the page numbers, section numbers and some of the glossary left visible. The department later said the document was censored in order to prevent “premature and unnecessary debate”. As proponents of universal surveillance like to say, “If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear”. It looks as though this government greatly fears the uncontrolled and unmonitored communication the internet makes possible.

US military authorities announced the laying of charges against Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old military intelligence analyst, on July 6. Manning was accused of leaking classified US military information through the whistle-blower web site Wikileaks.

The most notorious of the leaks ascribed to Manning is best known as the “Collateral Murder” video, summarised by the UK Guardian as “A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a fire-fight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency.” Manning is currently detained in Kuwait under US military investigation, facing a possible 50 years for presenting a glimpse of the reality of the US occupation.
Pentagon in pursuit

Wikileaks describes itself as an “uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking. Its founder and editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, has been on the move giving interviews and raising funds, while US authorities try to track him down. According to the Daily Beast web site, Pentagon investigators are seeking to interview Assange in relation to the Manning case.

The Pentagon would love to shut down Wikileaks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required mass disinformation campaigns to achieve their initial support. The fabrications to make the case for the invasion of Iraq were barely challenged in the mass media until the massacre had begun. The “Collateral Murder” video was politically damaging, and there are strong rumours of more damaging material to come, including another video of a massacre in Afghanistan, in addition to the 92,000 documents that Wikileaks gave to several US newspapers in July.

Among the leaks allegedly provided by Manning was a 2008 US counter-intelligence document noting that the effectiveness of Wikileaks is based on confidence in the protection of the anonymity of sources. The document proposed operations to undermine that confidence, recommending “the identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistle-blowers to deter people from using it. Thus far, the enemies of Wikileaks have failed to discredit the security of Wikileaks systems. The case against Manning was not triggered by any weakness in the Wikileaks infrastructure but by the betrayal of a hacker confidante who snitched on Manning.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and a developer of the famous Tor anonymity software, standing in for Assange, presented a keynote in defence of Wikileaks at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York in July. The speech promoted Wikileaks and encouraged civil disobedience as a democratic weapon against US foreign policy. Assange had decided against attending in order to avoid detention in the wake of the Manning arrest. After the conclusion of his presentation, Appelbaum dramatically managed to avoid federal authorities seeking to interview him by quietly slipping out a back door while a hoodie-wearing double with full entourage marched out the main entrance.
Fighting censorship

Wikileaks has been an instrument for defending democratic rights in Australia and a thorn in the side of the Australian government attempts to impose a mandatory blacklist-based censorship regime. The leaked secret blacklist was published, and its content demolished the proponents claims that the filter was exclusively targeting child abuse material.

A successful defence of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks would be victory for democracy and a defeat for the never-ending efforts by the rulers of the world to promote their war agendas by manipulating the media and presenting their pro-war narrative unchallenged.